The argument fields collected here I
am terming, with some reservation, false dialectics. Dialectic begins
with common opinion rather than known facts and "reasons to a contradiction"that
is, it sorts out common opinion to identify and discard contradictions
and arrive at a narrower but more certain truth. While it begins with
opinion dialectic ends with "truth" as the results of a dialectical
critical process. Unlike rhetoric, which remains pragmatic, partial
and contingent, or analytic, which begins from observable facts and
produces empirically verifiable theories (it's more complicated than
that but let's start there), Dialectic makes truth claims. Three umbrella
genres of dialectic with common roots in Western thought are philosophy,
theology and ideology. The argument fields dealt with here are "false
dialectics" because all three, each in different ways, are dialectics
masquerading as analytics, claiming to begin from or reason to scientific
facts when in fact they begin from conclusions that are analytically
either false or unproveable; whereas a sound dialectic is honest about
the derivation and truth value of its first principles.

SURFER BEWARE: In putting this information
on the web I run the risk of incidentally promoting that which I seek
to debunk. Each of these fields I heartily abhor for different reasons:
Conspiracy theories habituate paranoid and sloppy habits of thought;
Creation scientism, especially when taught in schools (!), fatally obstructs
understanding of normal science; and holocaust denial is an execrable
attempt to whitewash the worst atrocity in modern Western history, to
exonerate the perpetrators of the Holocaust and those who identify with
them, and to blame its victims for reminding us they exist. In each
case I have listed material put out by practitioners of the false dialectic,
followed by information about them from saner, more accurate sources.